.. only:: html .. note:: :class: sphx-glr-download-link-note Click :ref:`here ` to download the full example code .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-example-title .. _sphx_glr_gallery_recipes_create_subplots.py: Easily creating subplots ======================== In early versions of matplotlib, if you wanted to use the pythonic API and create a figure instance and from that create a grid of subplots, possibly with shared axes, it involved a fair amount of boilerplate code. e.g. .. code-block:: default import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np # Fixing random state for reproducibility np.random.seed(19680801) x = np.random.randn(50) # old style fig = plt.figure() ax1 = fig.add_subplot(221) ax2 = fig.add_subplot(222, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1) ax3 = fig.add_subplot(223, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1) ax3 = fig.add_subplot(224, sharex=ax1, sharey=ax1) .. image:: /gallery/recipes/images/sphx_glr_create_subplots_001.png :alt: create subplots :class: sphx-glr-single-img Fernando Perez has provided the nice top-level function `~matplotlib.pyplot.subplots` (note the "s" at the end) to create everything at once, and turn on x and y sharing for the whole bunch. You can either unpack the axes individually... .. code-block:: default # new style method 1; unpack the axes fig, ((ax1, ax2), (ax3, ax4)) = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True) ax1.plot(x) .. image:: /gallery/recipes/images/sphx_glr_create_subplots_002.png :alt: create subplots :class: sphx-glr-single-img .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-script-out Out: .. code-block:: none [] or get them back as a numrows x numcolumns object array which supports numpy indexing .. code-block:: default # new style method 2; use an axes array fig, axs = plt.subplots(2, 2, sharex=True, sharey=True) axs[0, 0].plot(x) plt.show() .. image:: /gallery/recipes/images/sphx_glr_create_subplots_003.png :alt: create subplots :class: sphx-glr-single-img .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-timing **Total running time of the script:** ( 0 minutes 1.007 seconds) .. _sphx_glr_download_gallery_recipes_create_subplots.py: .. only :: html .. container:: sphx-glr-footer :class: sphx-glr-footer-example .. container:: sphx-glr-download sphx-glr-download-python :download:`Download Python source code: create_subplots.py ` .. container:: sphx-glr-download sphx-glr-download-jupyter :download:`Download Jupyter notebook: create_subplots.ipynb ` .. only:: html .. rst-class:: sphx-glr-signature Keywords: matplotlib code example, codex, python plot, pyplot `Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery `_